Who's crypto-technical?

It seems abtuse, and ironic that Grice, one of the most crypto-technical philosophers that ever existed, would criticise Peirce for so being.

As "J", this blog, commented:

"On the Cryptic-o-meter I would think the mysterious Guru Hei. outscores CS Peirce (DASEIN!), but whatever."

Exactly. Peirce is crystal clear. So what is Grice up to? When I read his notes I realised how seriously he had taken Austin's "linguistic botanising". He, unlike Witters, or Peirce, is into English "... mean..." Not everybody knows how to use "... mean ..." My aunt doesn't. What's worse, my cousin either. And she overuses it in every conversational turn,

"if you know what I mean".

---- (I try to use the horseshoe to symbolise her 'if' but fail because she is Quinean rather than Griceian when it comes to 'mean').

So when you read WHY Grice found Peirce cryptic you cannot but amuse yourself! Grice

thought that the word "sign" is "CRYPTIC"! And it is!

Grice is lecturing on Peirce circa 1948, in Oxford.

In 1952, H. L. A. Hart (quite a specimen) will write a review of Holloway, "Words and signs" -- where he credits Grice for his points about "Meaning" which Grice had circulated in mimeo form in 1948.

In this lectures on Peirce, Grice proposes to replace all the Graeco-Roman terminology that Peirce had brought to the Anglo philosophy -- Such as the idea of

semeiosis
semantic
pragmatic
syntactic
icon
index
sign
indicative
abductive
reductive
deductive
inductive

and the rest of them (see "Love letters to Lady Welby" -- just teasing).
-- back to English terms Grice could understand better.

Instead of "signify", or "be a sign of", Grice made the wrong move, in retrospect, and with reference to the Romance Graeco-Roman tradition, to replace, "signify" and "sign" by "mean".

So words "mean", rather than signify, for Grice.

Their signifying is their "meaning".

And a cloud ALSO means. A cloud does not signify.

"Signify" IS a clumsy expression, but signum, or better, the Greek semeion, is not necessarily so.

And in any case, if Grice would have been writing in any of the Romance lingos derived from Latin, the choice of "mean" would NOT have been accepted.

There ARE expressions in the Romance languages which ARE cognate with "mean", but most likely, the issue Grice is discussing (Peirce, and later Stevenson) usually corresponds to a discourse on "signs".

--- Note that in Latin there's "mentAre" and "mentIre". Both are cognate with "mind" and "mean" but I think they mean the opposite. MentAre is just "to mean". But mentIre is to lie. Or something.

So, Grice finds that Peirce is being "cryptic" in using stuff like "sign". In America, where Peirce had followers like Morris (cited by Dale in his PhD on 'meaning' for CUNY, under Schiffer), it was different.

Grice makes TWO important, although rather fastidious, if you are familiar with a language of Graeco-Roman heritage (and one is surprised because he was a first in Classics but he was now teaching to Poltical and Philosophy and Economy students like Strawson). These two points are about:

-- Peirce being IMPROPER.

-- Peirce NOT being PROPER.

Grice puns on the "proper question".

If we are interested in this sort of stuff, we should be concerned, he says, with "mean", qua lexeme. This is the "proper" question.

By introducing technical, or crypto-technical, I think is his exact wording -- I possibly shared this with this club or elsehwere -- Grice says that Peirce is raising the "improper question".

Grice has a reason.

He wants his "ordinary language" English students (he never published these lectures during his lifetime) to be able to speak English.

And wants to give some directions about how "mean" is to be understood.

He goes on to use "mean" for things like

--- Those spots mean measles.
--- Black clouds mean rain.

etc.

In German, no such cognate for "mean" (they have "Meinung" and "meinen") will do here.

But Grice finds that to use Peirce´s categories of "index" and sign" can only confuse -- because they are not "ordinary language".

And he is lecturing as a member of the "school" of the "ordinary language philosophy" as practiced at Oxford at the time.

"Mean", on the other hand, IS an ordinary-language "expression". And so on.
But what he says, constructively, about Peirce, should also interest us. Especially when we have R. E. Dale displaying his wonderful admiration for that wonderful philosopher, Peirce, here and there.